Shooting Panoramas

Panoramas can be taken by special cameras, cropped from an image with a more standard aspect ratio, or created from a series of digital photos stitched together. When taking a series of photos intended to be stitched into a panorama, there are a couple of steps that can make the photos easier to stitch. Given roughly in order of importance, they are:

• Leave the camera at a fixed zoom. It is generally impossible to stitch a panorama if the shots were taken at different zoom levels.
• Overlap the pictures by one third to one half of the frame.
• Pick the exposure settings that will work best and lock the exposure. Otherwise, the exposure may be different for every photo, making the seams between photos obvious.
• Use a tripod and rotate the camera along a fixed line - either parallel to the ground (for horizontal panoramas) or a straight vertical line, such as the edge of a building (for vertical panoramas).
• Watch for moving objects. Ideally, the series of photos should be shot in the opposite direction to the objects' movement to avoid getting the objects in two different photos in the series. It is also advisable not to have moving objects too close to the edge of a shot.

It isn't impossible to shoot a panorama when these guidelines aren't followed, just more difficult. The panorama on this web page was quickly shot with a handheld camera without locking the exposure (and without paying attention to moving objects), but some extra work during the stitching step compensates.

The examples below are given for Photoshop Elements, but other software packages may have similar methods.

Here are the five original shots used in this panorama:

Stitching Panoramas

Since the exposure was not locked during the shooting, the rightmost two photos are noticeably darker than the other three. The brightness in these photos was increased by 20 using "Enhance > Adjust Lighting > Brightness/Contrast". This brightened the sky to be a good match with the adjoining photos, but washed out the foreground objects, which will have to be fixed later.

In general, other than adjustments to color and brightness to match photos that did not have the same exposure settings, it is easier to adjust those settings on the final image than each individual image. Typical adjustments to tweak color and brightness for each image before merging tends to make seams more visible.

The five photos were stitched using the Photomerge feature in Adobe Photoshop Elements. The extra time it takes to do the stitching when using the "Advanced Blending" option is worth the improved result. There are other programs that allow panorama stitching and panoramas can be stitched by hand using multiple layers, although that method is a considerable amount of work.

This is the initial result of using Photomerge:



There are a few problems with the merge:

• Since these photos were not shot using a tripod, the shots don't line up and the final photo will have to be cropped. For now, the photo is left uncropped to allow more available material for cloning.
• The washed out foreground objects on the right can be fixed with a combination of cloning in from the original, darker image and burning. An alternative would have been to not adjust the brightness initially and to dodge the sky in the merged version, but dodging large areas of similar tone is usually more difficult.
• There are a number of places in the panorama where the seam doesn't match up perfectly. These areas will need to be fixed with cloning. The cloning tips page has more information.
• Since the direction the photos were shot (left to right) was the same as the direction in which the swans were swimming, there is a duplicate set in the finished panorama, one of which is on a seam between merged photos. This can be fixed by cloning out the rightmost pair.

In general, the steps to stitching an cloning a panorama are done in the following order:

1. Fix exposure problems in the individual photos to match the brightness across all photos.
2. Stitch the panorama.
3. Fix cloning seam problems with objects in the photo. This does not include flares on seams that sometimes occur in large areas of uniform color.
4. Fix dust and noise problems.
5. Fix color, brightness, and contrast problems.
6. Fix cloning seam problems with flares in the photo and items that are to be cloned out of the photo.
7. Crop the photo.
8. Resample the image if needed.
9. Blur or sharpen as needed.
10. Save the image.

The macro panorama tips page has an example of a flare on a seam.

After all the cloning work and cropping, the finished panorama is shown below: